By Daniel M. Clark

Find Stuff

This week I’m welcoming two guests to the show, Eric Nagel and Kevin Webster. The topic is analytics, the measuring and analyzing of web traffic, and these two guys are extremely knowledgable. You will learn a lot from this episode, guaranteed.

Eric Nagel is an award-winning blogger and a six-year veteran affiliate marketer. He is an expert in SEO, analytics and tracking, programming and marketing. His blog at EricNagel.com is one of the most well-regarded sites in the space for the teaching of web tactics. Eric is @EricNagel on Twitter.

Kevin Webster is a master of affiliate marketing, web analytics and search engine optimization. In addition to consumers, Kevin is an expert in the B2B aspect of analytics and his blog at KevinWebster.us is a low-frills, get-down-to-business treasure trove of knowledge. Kevin is @levelanalytics on Twitter.

Open your note-taking program of choice or grab an old-fashioned pen and paper because you’ll want to take notes on this episode. Honestly, these guys are talking on a level so far above my own that I can’t do them justice here in the show notes – which isn’t to say I won’t try.

We kicked of the show with introductions and an explanation of why I sounded like Redd Foxx gargling molten asphalt.

Eric dived into the analytics discussion with the idea that more traffic does not equal more revenue, unless you’re running an AdSense site, which can operate a little differently.

Google Analytics is the big package that gets the most attention, but what about hosted solutions like StatCounter and pMetrics? Kevin and Eric got into the differences and the pros and cons between Google and the hosted services. There was a great discussion about Piwik here. Piwik feels a little different than Google but does many of the same things – including eCommerce and conversion tracking – and it has an API.

It’s one thing to get an analytics package set up, but it’s vital to sit down and learn to really use it to its full potential. Kevin warned against “data puking“, which really can’t be stressed enough. If you’re looking at a spreadsheet full of numbers without context, it’s almost worthless.

Eric made a great prediction about the future of analytics as compared to SEO at about the 19 minute mark. He believes that we’ll start seeing services for analytics implementation and interpretation the way we see that kind of service for search engine optimization.

Are you interested in real time Google Analytics? You will definitely want to hear the next segment, where Kevin and Eric walk users through the basics of getting it set up and running it. Kevin is also a Woopra user for real-time tracking.

Google recently made some changes to the type of data that it provides, right on the heels of announcing a paid version of Analytics. No longer will free users get keyword data if it was generated by a logged-in Google searcher. Kevin and Eric went over this is good detail.

Eric brought up a great point, that you should ideally be tracking visitors in three stages. How did they get to your site? What are they doing while they’re on your site? What are they doing when they leave your site (and where are they going)?

Lastly, make sure you are examining your data weekly. Make sure someone internally owns the account and knows how to use it. And thanks to Eric for plugging the Affiliate Summit Newcomer Program at the end of the show! It’s a great program for newcomers and veterans alike, so from Eric and I both, go sign up!

Great thanks to Eric and Kevin for coming on the show and blowing my mind with a lot of this stuff!